Friday, April 18, 2008

Communist Mazzola Man Fantasies

I am always amazed at the cartoonish image of Indians promoted by Communists who have likely never met one outside their cloistered life. This image is an arrogant repackaging of the noble savage myth.

Myth number one is that all cultural practices are mere variants. Thus practices of some tribes including slavery, human sacrifice and torture of POWs are cultural variants. The notion that Indians were communing with nature is more Mazzola than real. Survival was a tough task that required back breaking work. In many ways our perception of what Indians were is colored by our own biases more than their lives. In short Indians were themselves and we should not try to define them in their own terms.

Myth number two Indians hate Christians. This must come as a surprise to the Indians themselves who are often very devout Christians. Obviously these Indians do not know theirown thoughts as well as outsiders who study them from textbooks.

Myth number 3 Missionaries tell people what to think and do. This is amusing especially when these comments come from people who want to play God themselves. Herding people onto collectives, stealing property and running repressive totalitarian states like Cuba and North Korea must be inconvenient facts.

6 comments:

Hey, Beak, did you get a kick out of McCain grandstanding on "earmarks"? He's going to cut out nearly all of them. The only earmarks he'll allow is the ones currently used to fund billions in Israeli welfare checks. Those can stay.

Damn, I didn't know the Congress used earmarks to push those through. Cowards don't even have the sac to put them in a specific bill

About Me

I am a Rudy Republican . The
peril of being a moderate is
that at times you get hit from
both sides. Some say I am at the edge of the great GOP tent. Radical leftists call me a rightwing extreemist.Yet in the end all we can ever be
is ourselves.